Adult Onset

Mary Rose MacKinnon is a successful author of YA fiction doing a tour of duty as stay-at-home mom while her partner Hilary takes a turn focusing on her career. She tries valiantly to balance the (mostly) solo parenting of two young children with the relentless needs of her aging parents. But amid the hilarities of full-on domesticity arises a sense of dread. Do others notice the dents in the expensive refrigerator?

Small Great Things: A Novel

Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than 20 years' experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she's been reassigned to another patient. The parents are white supremacists and don't want Ruth, who is African American, to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day the baby goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is alone in the nursery. Does she obey orders, or does she intervene?

Drowning Ruth

Deftly written and emotionally powerful, Drowning Ruth is a stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart, of the dangers of keeping secrets and the explosive repercussions when they are exposed. A mesmerizing and achingly beautiful debut.

The Underground Railroad (Oprah's Book Club)

The Newest Oprah Book Club 2016 Selection. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood - where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

The Gilded Hour

The year is 1883, and in New York City it's a time of dizzying splendor, crushing poverty, and tremendous change. With the gravity-defying Brooklyn Bridge nearly complete and New York in the grips of antivice crusader Anthony Comstock, Anna Savard and her cousin, Sophie - both graduates of the Woman's Medical School - treat the city's most vulnerable, even if doing so may put everything they've strived for in jeopardy.

The Excellent Lombards

Mary Frances "Frankie" Lombard is fiercely in love with her family's sprawling apple orchard and the tangled web of family members who inhabit it. Content to spend her days planning capers with her brother, William, competing with her brainy cousin, Amanda, and expertly tending the orchard with her father, Frankie desires nothing more than for the rhythm of life to continue undisturbed. But she cannot help being haunted by the historical fact that some family members end up staying on the farm and others must leave.

Linda L Liestman says:"Just Delightful and the Narrator was Perfect for the Voice"

The Midwife of Hope River: A Novel of an American Midwife

Midwife Patience Murphy has a gift: a talent for escorting mothers through the challenges of bringing children into the world. Working in the hardscrabble conditions of Appalachia during the Depression, Patience takes the jobs that no one else wants, helping those most in need - and least likely to pay. She knows a successful midwifery practice must be built on a foundation of openness and trust - but the secrets Patience is keeping are far too intimate and fragile for her to ever let anyone in.

The Shadow Sister: The Seven Sisters, Book 3

When their father dies, Star D'Aplièse and her six sisters, all adopted by him from the four corners of the world, are left with few clues to their heritage. But Star - the most enigmatic of the sisters - is hesitant to step out of the safety of the close relationship she shares with her sister CeCe. In desperation, she decides to follow her first clue, which leads her to an antiquarian bookshop in London, and the start of a whole new world....

Commonwealth

One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly - thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Madeleine Thien's new novel is breathtaking in scope and ambition, even as it is hauntingly intimate. With the ease and skill of a master storyteller, Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations - those who lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution in the mid-20th century; and the children of the survivors, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989, in one of the most important political moments of the past century.

Behold the Dreamers: A Novel

Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself; his wife, Neni; and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty - and Jende is eager to please. Clark's wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses' summer home in the Hamptons.

A Fine Balance

In the India of the mid-1970s, Indira Gandhi's government has just come to power. It institutionalizes corruption and arbitrary force, most oppressive to the poorest and weakest people under its sway. Against this backdrop, in an unnamed city by the sea, four people struggle to survive. Dina, Maneck, and two tailors, the Untouchables Om and Ishvar, who are sewing in Dina's service, undergo a series of reversals.

New York socialite Caroline Ferriday has her hands full with her post at the French consulate and a new love on the horizon. But Caroline's world is forever changed when Hitler's army invades Poland in September 1939 - and then sets its sights on France. An ocean away from Caroline, Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish teenager, senses her carefree youth disappearing as she is drawn deeper into her role as courier for the underground resistance movement.

Faithful: A Novel

Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend's future is destroyed in an accident while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt. What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor filled with emotion, from dark suffering to true happiness - a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world.

Moonglow: A Novel

Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as "my grandfather". It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at mid-century and, above all, of the destructive impact - and the creative power - of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies.

A Little Life: A Novel

When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.

A Man Called Ove

Meet Ove. He's a curmudgeon - the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him "the bitter neighbor from hell". But behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness.

The Lake House

Living on her family’s gorgeous lakeside estate in Cornwall, England, Alice Edevane is a bright, clever, inquisitive, innocent, and precociously talented fourteen-year-old who loves to write stories. But the mysteries she pens are no match for the one her family is about to endure ...One midsummer’s eve, after a beautiful party drawing hundreds of guests to the estate has ended, the Edevanes discover that their youngest son, Theo, has vanished without a trace.

News of the World: A Novel

In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.

Cane River

Cane River is an isolated community that lies on a small river in central Louisiana. There in the early 19th century, slaves, free people of color, and Creole French planters lived and worked, loved and bore children. And there, 165 years later, Tademy discovers her amazing heritage. Beginning with her great-great-great-great grandmother, a slave owned by a Creole family, Tademy chronicles four generations of strong, determined black women.

Here on Earth

March Murray, along with her 15-year-old daughter, Gwen, returns to the small Massachusetts town where she grew up to attend the funeral of Judith Dale, the beloved housekeeper who raised her. After nearly 20 years of living in California, March is thrust into the world of her past.

Barkskins: A Novel

In the late 18th century, Rene Sel, an illiterate woodsman, makes his way from Northern France to New France to seek a living. Bound to a feudal lord, a seigneur, for three years in exchange for land, he suffers extraordinary hardship, always in awe of the forest he is charged with cleaning. Rene marries an Indian healer with children already, and they have more, mixing the blood of two cultures. Proulx tells the stories of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of two lineages, the Sels and the Duquets.

Love Warrior (Oprah's Book Club: A Memoir)

The Newest Oprah Book Club 2016 Selection. The highly anticipated new memoir by bestselling author Glennon Doyle Melton tells the story of her journey of self-discovery after the implosion of her marriage. Just when Glennon Doyle Melton was beginning to feel she had it all figured out—three happy children, a doting spouse, and a writing career so successful that her first book catapulted to the top of the New York Times bestseller list—her husband revealed his infidelity and she was forced to realize that nothing was as it seemed.

Keys Shopper says:"Starts out great but takes a sharp right hand turn"

Tara Road

When two unhappy women switch homes for the summer, there are extraordinary consequences, and each learns that the other has a deep secret that can never be revealed. At the end of the summer, when the women at last meet face-to-face, they find that they have become, firmly and forever, good friends.

Publisher's Summary

The Piper family is steeped in secrets, lies, and unspoken truths. At the eye of the storm is one secret that threatens to shake their lives, even destroy them.

Set on stormy Cape Breton Island off Nova Scotia, Fall on Your Knees is an internationally acclaimed muligenerational saga that chronicles the lives of four unforgettable sisters. Theirs is a world filled with driving ambition, inescapable family bonds, and forbidden love.

Compellingly written, by turns menacingly dark and hilariously funny, this is a tale of five generations of sin, guilt, and redemption.

What the Critics Say

"An unforgettable novel." (AudioFile) "MacDonald is a talented storyteller with a crisp yet lilting prose style." (Booklist) "Ms. MacDonald skillfully shifts the story backward and forward in time, giving it a mythic quality that allows dark, half-buried secrets to be gracefully and chillingly revealed." (The New York Times Book Review) "Beautiful....this big, bold, epic shocker of a novel reads as if John Irving met Joyce Carol Oates in her Gothic period....It's a wild ride." (Chicago Tribune)

I absolutely love this book and I have recommended it to countless people for some time now. I read it in paperback about nine years ago and it had me literally sitting at the edge of my seat with my hand clasped over my mouth while I was reading the beginning of Book 2. Never before has a story held me quite so breathless. I have been meaning to reread the book for years but never got around to it, so when I saw it on Audible I couldn't resist. I've been so happy with Audible and look forward to my credit day every month.

Did Nikki James do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?

Nikkii James mostly did a fine job, and definitely differentiated the character, but I must say she ruined the very part of the book that had been my whole reason for wanting to reread it in the first place. The sing-songie baby voice that she used for the Frances and Mercedes during the most gut wrenching chapters took away from the severity of what was happening.

I wish it would have been more upfront that this story is largely centered around pedophilia. I'm a pretty liberal book reader but this is a book that I wouldn't want to discuss with anyone because it's perverse. The description makes it sound much more romantic but it's really nothing of the sort.

How could the performance have been better?

I really hated how the narrator changed her voice for the characters. It was very forced and annoying.

This is a good... long... read. It was well written with good insight into this family's life. It was touching and interesting and *perhaps* worth the listen, but it wasn't memorable. If given the book read/listen to it, but if you're considering buying it, I'd give it a miss.

The subject matter of this book ranges between disturbing (on the bright side) and revolting (on the dark side). I gave the book two stars because given the subject matter, it is written and narrated well. I found the characters somewhat flat and, looking back on the reading/listening experience, can't really decide if I related to any of them. I also took exception with the somewhat bland way some of the more violent issues were addressed.

I like to read a mixture of non-fiction (nutrition and memoirs) and fantasy. I use audible for more exciting and lighthearted reads as I still prefer to read a hard copy book (and can't stand ebooks for some reason). At any given time, I'm usually reading 3 or more books.

This book was full of surprises and the characters were extremely well developed. It did a great job at writing about real life with real descriptions.

Which character – as performed by Nikki James – was your favorite?

Frances was probably my favorite character. She was complicated and adventurous but also pure in a surprising way.

Who was the most memorable character of Fall On Your Knees and why?

In the end, it is really hard to choose because the book does a great job at telling each character's story from their point of view, and you really get to know them well. Kathleen and Frances and Rose and Lily maybe in that order haha.

Any additional comments?

The first half of the book I wasn't that into it, and I kept waiting for something to happen. After the first half LOTS happened and I was intrigued and moved in many ways - I even cried at one point. Worth the read. Intricately woven, and I can see why this book got such high reviews from Oprah and others.

This is a great story with great characters. It misses the overall 'great' mark by relying on too many literay cliches and coincidences. Overall, I really enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it. I have always been intrigued by this part of the world (Nova Scotia) and really wish the author had spent more time on the setting.